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A very funny little story about the French incomprehension of the way that the world actually works. Of course, my being English does mean that I'm biased here: I'm unlikely to think that our near neighbours get anything right at all, from cheese to the attention that should be paid to marriage vows. But even allowing for such prejudice this is really a rather good story about Google.

France’s new government has been making noise about forcing Google to pay for the privilege of linking to French news sites.

Umm, what? Everyone else on the planet is desperately trying to make sure that their results come high up in the Google index. For this means more traffic and traffic means money in an advertising supported world. And Google does indeed send substantial traffic to the websites of the French newspapers:

Google responded by threatening to remove all French news sites from its index, which would presumably eliminate the 4 billion clicks it sends to those sites every year.

Now I'm not privy to what this particular outlet earns on traffic but I do know numbers for some others: anything from $1/000 pages views up to $80. The low end is a reasonably trafficked blog and the top end something like perhaps Yahoo's finance pages (although that number is slightly out of date). Just for the sake of argument let's pluck the number of $10/000 page views from that range.

The French argument now becomes that Google must pay the French newspapers for sending $40 million a year of revenue to the French newspapers.

No, I don't get it either.

We might add a couple of other points too. Google.fr's news pages don't carry any advertising. So Google's not actually making any revenue out of this. Further, any French newspaper can opt out of the search engine just by making a minor change to the robots.txt of their own site. Which brings us to one of the things that economists bang on about. Don't listen to what people say, look at what they do. So called "revealed preferences". That the French newspapers do not exclude the Googlebot by changing their robots.txt is proof perfect that the French newspapers think they gain from the current arrangement.

French economics: you must pay for the privilege of sending us money. I can't help but feel that they've slightly misunderstood the economics of Google here. Allowing even for the prejudices of an Englishman this shouldn't really surprise. The last Frenchman known to understand the economics of anything was Frederic Bastiat and he died in 1850. After all, this is the country that fined Google for giving people things for free.